When we started building Friend Connect, we wanted to provide a fully open system — one that lets you join any website and interact with the people there in a meaningful way, regardless of where they come from. To enable this kind of engagement, we used open standards like OpenID, OAuth, and OpenSocial as underlying technologies, enabling any other service to plug into Friend Connect.

Today, we're excited to share that Netlog has used these open standards to integrate their social networking service with Google Friend Connect. Now, Netlog's more than 45 million users across Europe can:

Sign into any of the millions of sites and blogs using Friend Connect with their Netlog credentials

Use their Netlog profiles on these sites

See if any of their friends are already members of the same sites and invite other Netlog friends to join

Share their Friend Connect activities with their friends on Netlog, and

Send messages back to their Netlog friends

Additionally, for sites that are already using Friend Connect, one of the benefits of this standards based model is that they can take advantage of any new service that chooses to join this open ecosystem, like Netlog, without any additional work. The new network option simply appears.

Any social network or service, whether they are large or small, regional or global, niche or general audience, is welcome to take advantage of these open standards to integrate with Friend Connect, and participate in an open social web.